Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment

Kevin S. Douglas, Randy K. Otto, Kevin S. Douglas, Randy K. Otto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138698703
• eBook ISBN: 9781315518350
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

The Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment, Second Edition, builds on the first edition's comprehensive discussion of violence risk assessment instruments with an update of research on established tools and the addition of new chapters devoted to recently developed risk assessment tools.

Featuring chapters written by the instrument developers themselves, this handbook reviews the most frequently used violence risk assessment instruments—both actuarial and structured professional judgment—that professionals use to inform and structure their judgments about violence risk. Also included are broader chapters that address matters such as the consideration of psychopathy and how the law shapes violence risk assessment.

Already the primary reference for practitioners, researchers, and legal professionals in this area, this second edition's easy-to-access, comprehensive, and current information will make it an indispensable reference for those in the field.

Part I
Core Themes and Critical Analysis of the Field

Chapter 1
Approaches to Violence Risk Assessment

Overview, Critical Analysis, and Future Directions

Kirk Heilbrun, Kento Yasuhara, Sanjay Shah, and Benjamin Locklair

The problems presented by violence in contemporary society have been an important consideration for many decades. As the law has turned to the behavioral and medical sciences to improve the prospects for accurately appraising and managing the risk of violent behavior, the past thirty years have witnessed the development and validation of specialized tools for the prediction and management of certain kinds of serious violence and criminal offending. The second edition of this book offers a description of some of these tools, developed for specific purposes in legal contexts, and the relevant research associated with them.

Risk Assessment Considerations

This chapter provides a context in which the specific tools described in subsequent chapters can be considered. There are six important considerations applicable to risk assessment tools that will be addressed in the first section: context, purpose, population, parameters, approach, and applicability. Subsequent sections of the chapter focus on approaches to risk assessment, the major features of each approach, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and their respective states of validation. The present chapter does not provide an in-depth review of the validation data relevant to specific tools. That is addressed in the subsequent chapters describing the various risk assessment tools.

Context

The first consideration in conducting a violence risk assessment involves the broad context in which this appraisal is being conducted. Such context influences the nature of the decision to be made, who is responsible for this decision, and the consequences that can result from differing appraisals. There are four important (and different) contexts in which a risk assessment is likely to be conducted: legal, clinical, school/workplace, and threats to protectees. Legal contexts are those in which a legal (or quasi-legal) decision-maker must render a decision in the course of litigation or administrative tribunal. Such contexts may be in the domain of criminal or civil proceedings (see, e.g., Melton et al., 2018). Decisions in this context may involve initial civil commitment or criminal sentencing, release from incarceration or secure hospitalization, or steps that may be associated with a planned release (such as community notification or post-sentence civil commitment for sexual offenders).

Clinical contexts involve circumstances under which interventions are delivered to reduce the risk of violence or offending in the broader context of a treatment relationship. This context is sufficiently broad to include interventions in secure settings (e.g., jails, prisons, forensic hospitals) as well as those delivered using some leverage (e.g., to individuals on parole, probation, diversion from prosecution, or juvenile home-based placement) and others using no leverage at all (e.g., mental health treatment delivered on a voluntary basis to individuals in the community, in jurisdictions in which there is a settled Tarasoff-type obligation to warn or protect).

School/workplace contexts encompass threats of harm to others that are typically not yet a part of formal legal proceedings, in which both the seriousness of the threat and the nature of the indicated risk-reduction strategies are important parts of the overall appraisal. Assessment in these settings is typically conducted in response to the concerns raised by the actions of specific individuals such as students or employees, rather than in a broader process involving all individuals in the setting.

Finally, threats to protectees also involve the dual issues of threat seriousness and risk management. However, they differ because they are directed toward specific individuals (those under the protection of the Secret Service or federal marshals, for example), or the kind of broader targets involved in domestic or international terrorism. Included as well in this category are threats involving potential harm to a domestic partner, where there is typically a specified victim and the initial appraisal is made by police who are called to the scene.

Most of the chapters in this book are devoted to different specialized risk assessment tools that are almost entirely applicable in legal contexts. Accordingly, that will also be the focus of discussion in this chapter. It should be noted that a number of specialized measures referenced in this chapter and described further in this book would be appropriate for use in clinical and threats to protectees contexts, as these have just been described.

Purpose

One of the important influences on contemporary conceptions of risk assessment is the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model described by Canadian researchers (see Chapter 8, this volume; Andrews, Bonta, & Hoge, 1990; Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2006; Bonta & Andrews, 2017). This involves the appraisal of three related domains. Risk refers to the probability that the examinee will engage in a certain kind of behavior in the future, typically either violence/violent offending, or criminal offending of any kind, with higher-risk individuals receiving more intensive intervention and management services under the risk principle. This kind of risk classification has most frequently been measured by using static risk factors, which do not change through planned intervention, although some tools (e.g., the LS measures; see Andrews & Bonta, 2001; Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2004; Chapters 8 and 9; and all structured professional judgment tools, for example, Douglas, Hart, Webster, & Belfrage, 2013; Kropp & Hart, 2015; see also Hart, Douglas, & Guy, 2017; Chapters 11–18 in this volume) use both static risk factors and risk-relevant needs. Needs are variables describing deficits which are related to the probability of such targeted outcomes; they are composed of dynamic risk factors (called criminogenic needs in the RNR model) or protective factors that have the potential to change through such planned intervention. Targeting interventions to address criminogenic needs is the goal described by the need principle. Responsivity refers to the extent to which an individual is likely to respond to intervention(s) enacted to reduce the probability of the targeted outcome behavior.

A comparable distinction involving risk assessment in legal contexts has been made between prediction and risk management (Heilbrun, 1997), in which it was observed that some legal decisions are best informed by a prediction of whether the individual will reoffend or otherwise behave violently. Perhaps the most frequent example of such a decision involves civil commitment, in which the legal decision-maker must decide whether the likelihood that the individual will harm others (or self) is sufficient to justify involuntary hospitalization. There is a limited risk management component to this decision, although future decisions regarding such individuals (such as release from hospitalization) must consider risk management to a much greater extent. If the risk is sufficiently high, the court will presumably grant the petition for civil commitment. If not, the petition is likely to be denied (or granted on grounds other than risk to harm others). But under neither circumstance would the court be particularly concerned with a specific approach to lowering the violence risk. In contrast to civil commitment, when the court does maintain jurisdiction over the individual following the decision—for example, when the defendant is diverted to mental health court or committed as Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity—then both level of risk and the nature of the risk-relevant needs can help inform the court’s decision.¹

Specialized risk assessment tools are designed to provide information that either is particular to the question of prediction or that addresses both risk and needs (with associated implications for intervention). This will be discussed in greater detail subsequently in this chapter. To our knowledge, there are no specialized tools that focus only on risk reduction (although a number of tools include risk reduction intervention-planning as a primary goal). However, there is a technique (anamnestic assessment) derived from applied behavior analysis that promotes the informed selection of risk-relevant needs based on the individual’s history. Such an approach can also be used with risk-need tools, in a manner to be discussed later in this chapter.

Populations

One of the important considerations in risk assessment involves the population to which the individual being assessed actually belongs. There are important differences in base rates of violence, risk factors and protective factors,² and risk-relevant interventions for differing populations. In addition, specialized tools are typically derived and validated to apply to a single population (e.g., juvenile offenders) or related populations (adult offenders or insanity acquittees, sex offenders), but not across widely discrepant populations.

There are four considerations in delineating a population for risk assessment purposes. These are age, gender, behavioral health status, and location. Age typically refers to three distinct groups: preadolescent children, adolescents, and adults (and possibly older adults). Gender is important because a specialized tool may not be validated for females or may use different norms. The behavioral health status of a population refers to whether it is selected through assessment, intervention, or legal action as having a number of individuals with behavioral health problems. Since justice-involved and behavioral health are among the populations to which risk assessment is most often applied, it is particularly important to distinguish behavioral health populations without formal justice involvement at the relevant time (e.g., those who are civilly committed) from general offender populations in which behavioral health problems are not part of the selection criteria. This can become more complex when considering populations such as criminal defendants who have been adjudicated Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity which, by definition, include both behavioral health and offending among the selection criteria.

Finally, the variable of location refers to the setting from which the population is drawn. Offending populations can be drawn from the community (e.g., those on probation or parole) or from an institutional setting. School and work are examples of settings with populations that are typically not offenders. There can again be increased complexity when the risk appraisal involves assessment of individuals in one setting but considers their risk for violence or offending in another—such as when convicted persons or insanity acquittees are appraised for their risk of violence in the community following release from prison or the hospital, respectively. The consideration of these four variables—age, gender, behavioral health status, and setting—allows the identification of a population with sufficient specificity to determine whether a given risk assessment tool should be used. This choice is straightforward when the examinee is part of a specific population for which a particular tool was developed (e.g., use of a sexual violence risk tool with an individual convicted of a sex offense).

Parameters

The next important consideration in risk assessment involves what is being predicted, with what frequency of outcome, at what probability or category of risk, in what setting, over what period of time, and the nature of the risk factors and protective factors involved in the appraisal. It is important to specify, in the beginning, what outcome(s) are of concern. The broader the class of outcomes, the higher the base rate will be. The impact of base rates is discussed elsewhere in this chapter. It is also necessary to consider how this outcome will be measured. Both researchers and practitioners have employed approaches to appraising violent behavior or violent offending that include (1) self-report, (2) the report of collateral observers, and (3) official records (e.g., rearrest, rehospitalization). In the context of non-criminal community violence in the United States, the most sensitive of these measures is self-report, with collateral observation second and official records a distant third (Monahan et al., 2001; Steadman et al., 1998). But this may vary widely across jurisdictions, countries, and contexts, depending on whether the individual has a strong incentive to deny or minimize self-reported impairments or intentions, whether s/he is seen regularly by a collateral observer, and the extent to which official records are likely to reflect the occurrence of such behavior.

Next, we consider the specific parameters of the behavior itself. Ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction and Overview
• Part I Core Themes and Critical Analysis of the Field
• Part II Empirical-Actuarial Measures
• Part III Rational-Actuarial Measures
• Part IV Structured Professional Judgment Measures
• Index